Development of electronic and computer technology, as well as telecommunication facilities has a large impact on the lifestyle of people. A steady trend towards miniaturization of electronic devices and their increased mobility allows to quickly and efficiently solve the tasks of location of moving and non-moving objects. Computer technology has been widely used to solve household issues and to entertain. Modern computer games present vast and complex virtual environments, and object location in them can be identified in different ways. Finally, modern mobile and portable electronic devices allow to provide images of objects that do not exist in the real world using the augmented reality means. Identification of location of such virtual objects in the real world is becoming an increasingly relevant issue as well.
A wide range of the above tasks associated with identification of location of a random object in a random place and time is indicative of the necessity to create a unified (“universal”) location identification system. Various locating systems are known.
For example, known systems include cellular wireless networks. In the last 20 years, popularity and application of mobile terminals, or mobile telephones that people carry on them everywhere and use to perform multiple functions, have been increasing rapidly. As it is known, a cellular system is based on cells, or coverage regions, that can be defined as certain geographically limited areas serviced by base transceiver stations. At the same time, such cellular network architecture can be used to identify location of a mobile station, and, correspondingly, of its user within its coverage area. It is known that location identification service can be based on a cell's coverage area, or a service area. However, the identification name of a base station is difficult to memorize as it is made of a sequence of digits. Besides, different operators have different numbering systems for areas, and the size of each cellular area is fixed and may cover an area that is too large to achieve a desired precision.
Known systems may further include, for example, geocoding. Geocoding assigns coordinates, for example, latitude and longitude, to an actual mailing address. Different geocoding systems are based at least on the geographic information system (GIS), where street network has references to geographic coordinates. However, a mailing address shows poor accuracy when solving a number of tasks: for example, a mailing address does not always specify the building entrance number or the floor number. For more accurate location identification one can use geographic coordinates provided in the form of latitude and longitude, however, in this case such a sequence of digits is difficult for people to memorize, and it is easy to make a mistake when transferring it.
For further example, some approaches are based on the transformation of GPS geographic coordinates into a sequence of symbols and/or words. For example, a method for producing a location identifier has been described. The method include operations of: obtaining the geographic coordinates of a location, converting the geographic coordinates into single unique value n; converting the value n into a unique group of a plurality of values; converting the plurality of values into an equal plurality of respective words; and providing the plurality of words as a location identifier. The location identification method comprises a reverse sequence of operations obtaining the geographic coordinates.
A system for translating geographic coordinates into an easy to memorize word combination has also been described. The approach may include a program implemented on a computer, using which the computer translates inputted geographic coordinates into a word combination as well as translates the word combination back into the geographic coordinates. A user may use a mobile computing device to determine the coordinates of a location, the program may translate the coordinates to the word combination, and then the user may memorize the word combination displayed by the mobile computing device for later use.
However, solutions based on transformation of GPS geographic coordinates into a sequence of symbols and/or words are not universal, or, to be more precise, they are used to transform geographic coordinates only, and are not capable of distinguishing between different objects having the same geographic coordinates, or of handling a moving object that is located by different coordinates at different times.
Known systems may further include, for example, geotagging. Geotagging method involves assigning word identification to geographic coordinates, stored in metadata of a photograph. Geotagging is used to find information associated with a certain location. For example, one may search for photographs taken near a given location by entering geotags into a search engine. A method for geotagging using barcodes has been described, including associating geotag information obtained from a barcode with image or video data. The apparatus includes a camera module for capturing an image or video of an object, a barcode decoding module for receiving barcode data related to the object and for extracting geotag information from the barcode data, and a processor for associating the geotag information with the image or video. At the same time, geographic coordinates for an object photograph geotag is obtained from a one-dimensional or two-dimensional (QR) barcode located on the object itself or near the object.
However, symbolic geotag identifications usually cannot be transferred from one application to another, as different applications use separate unrelated geotagging systems. For example, Instagram™ application has its own geotagging system, and Twitter™ applications have their own one.
Apart from geotags, various tracking systems are used to track moving objects—aircrafts and watercrafts. Such systems use symbolic identification (for example, a flight number or a ship name) to obtain geographic coordinates of the current location. However, one system is used to track aircrafts, and another one is used to track watercraft. If one takes a geotag or a symbolic identification of a craft from one system and tries to use it in another system, it won't work.
It would be desirable, therefore, to develop new technologies for locating an object in a set of spatial coordinates, or for navigating in a set of spatial coordinates, that overcomes these and other limitations of the prior art, and enhances accuracy, speed, universal applicability and usability of navigational data.